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Forte  aural  development

Forte's Aural Development Program had been designed to enhance students ability to learn and retain music.  Solfege training gives students musical "phonological awareness" or sensitivity to sound.  Phonological Awareness is the ability to understand the sounds of language.

Forte'a Aural Development process has been designed to:
  1. Extend aural memory, pitch, notes, harmony & keys (with the aim for perfect pitch )   
  2. Extend memory retention & capacity 
  3. Prepare aurally, prior to keyboard playing 
  4. Teach and improve singing


There are many benefits to learning music. and many relate to aural development.  Research has shown that musicians are better than non-musicians at:
  1. encoding music and speech
  2. showing great neural enhancement of pitch
  3. encoding linguistic pitch information
  4. responding faster to speech
  5. responding to higher harmonics
  6. responding to peaks of emotional stimulus.

(Source: North Western University)

You will notice that these all relate to auditory processing.

Why  does  forte  use  solfege?

Solfege is a worldwide language.  If you speak a language that doesn’t use Roman characters like Chinese, Arabic or Russian, then your language doesn’t use As, Bs or Cs.  Often most orchestras in Europe will speak in solfege as they will have players from many different countries.

This special musical language means that there’s no confusion with the alphabet.  This is especially important for young children who are beginning to learn to read.  There’s nothing more confusing to a young child to learning music starting on C, D, E then after G it goes back to A.  Solfege is equally accepted as either an ascending or descending pattern, whereas the traditional alphabet is taught as a one-directional pattern (always beginning on the same letter, A).  It is difficult to relax this way of thinking.

As singing is vitally important to success in young musicians, the rounded vowel sounds of solfege create less tension in the neck and jaw as apposed to the “ee” sounds in C, D, E.  Solfege has a nicer sound for singing.

Paul Myatt, Director of Forte School of  Music says, "There have been many debates about fixed do and movable do.  Both are great ways to learn and neither is “better” than the other.  In my own experience I have learnt both movable Do and fixed Do.  Movable Do is great if your goal is developing singing and intervallic memory.  Movable Do or tonic solfa becomes problematic when you sing in modes or have key changes because Do is the tonic and the tonic can change.  If one uses movable Do to sight sing, one has to have extremely good numeric conversion ability because the solfa names relate to the scale degree numbers.   Having studied French Horn, a transposing instrument, at university, tonic solfa helped me to practice sight transposing,

Fixed Do is much more appropriate for a fixed pitch instrument like the piano.  As Forte utilises multi-sensory learning, DO always looks (visual), sounds (auditory) and feels (kinaesthetic) the same. Fixed Do has the advantage of assisting understanding of different keys and their intervallic relationship."


Letter names are introduced at the end of Junior Keys Book 4 which is the end of the 2nd year from this time onward, students will use both solfege and letter names.  There are only 7 notes, so there’s not much confusion in learning both names.  Letter terminology is used early in the course to identify keys.  So we would say C major starts of Do or G major starts on So.

The next video will take you through Forte's Aural Development program and Memory Solfege.



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  • Home
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      • Jungle Music Training Videos
      • Jungle Music Teacher Training
      • Jungle Music Teaching Examples
      • Forest Friends
      • On The Sea
      • Driving My Tractor
      • Knock Knock
    • Music is Fun >
      • MIF Overview
      • MIF - Resources
      • MIF Lesson Plans
      • MIF - Lesson Observation
    • Junior Keys >
      • Junior Keys Level 1
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      • Junior Keys Level 3
      • Junior Keys Level 4
    • Piano Keys >
      • PKC 1a
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      • PKC 2 VAK Movements
      • PKC - Training
    • Creative Keys >
      • CKC Teacher Guide
      • CKC Lesson 19
      • CKC 1 VAK Movements
      • CKC Hello Song
  • Training
    • Health & Safety
    • Jungle Music
    • Music is Fun
    • JKC & PKC
    • CKC
    • Private Tuition
  • Start a Forte School
  • Contact
  • Schools Teacher Pages
    • Wantirna
  • PKC 1a VAK Private Teachers
  • PKC 1b VAK Movements
  • PKC 2 VAK Movements
  • JKC 4 VAK Private Duet
  • PKC 1a - Lesson Plans